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Website Tour: My Theme Park

My Theme Park was the most ambitious project I ever took on. I believe it was a month into it where I felt like it was just too much for one amateur to take on. My Theme Park was supposed to be a detailed theme park manager where you could buy and sell rides, control staff and set wages, and handle emergencies such as weather storms or accidents.This was actually the last thing I worked on before giving up on the project. Whenever I make sites and complete the first release, I immediately find something I want to add that would have me adding a column to a table. That’s why I wanted to make the registration as detailed as possible without making it too long. My plan was to have basic setup, and then nagging notifications to get you to fill in necessary things to get started once you first log in.

I took the registration and log in system from previous projects, but I also added a confirmation email that sends at the end of the registration which was something that was new to me. That’s still my first and only time doing such a thing (sending emails with PHP). And just so you know, the “use the golf cart” thing was just a link to let you skip redirection wait.

This was the main page of the portal once you logged in. An example of the detail I wanted was that weather would have been affected by the location you chose your park to be in when you registered.The Park Analyzer was your park profile and operations panel. Another example of details is that the more hours you had your park open, the more earnings and expenses you’d get and higher ride maintenance costs.

The administrator panel was also taken from previous projects but this one would have a lot more things to manage. This is an example of adding rides to the catalog where park managers would be able to pick up new rides.

The biggest challenge was setting up the PHP script that would run daily that would automatically tally up numbers throughout your panel (such as expenses, revenue, total ride operating times, etc). It became a lot to handle and I couldn’t get it working reliably. That was the point where I gave this project up, though I don’t regret working on it at all. It was a big project and I got to experiment with many new features that I’d love to add to future sites. You’ll see some of the things on the last two sites I have left to showcase. Stay tuned!